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-- © GodSpeak International 2008 --
-- Do not republish without written permission from <copyright@godspeak.net> --

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND CONTRIBUTING RESOURCES
Author: Teresa Seputis ts@godspeak.net http://www.godspeak.net

Encountering God

Lesson 12
Pursuing Direct Encounters With The Lord

By Teresa Seputis

We have spent the last eleven lessons looking at various ways that we can have encounters with God. Some of them have been were God meets us in various aspects of our day-to-day life, or where He comes to us in subtle ways. I call that "every-day life" encounters with God. We also saw that sometimes God will meet us in a way that is overtly divine or supernatural, and those are what I call "direct" encounters with God.

We have discovered that it is more common to have the "everyday life" type of encounters with God than the "direct" ones. Every believer will have many of the former--though they may not be spiritually tured in enough to recognize all of them. God is a relational God and a loving Father, and He loves to have encounters and intimacy with His children. He loves to reach into our lives to meet us and help us. He will meet us in His subtle everyday life ways many times throughout the week.

Of course, the more responsive we are to to God when He reaches out to meet us, the more often He will reach out to us. That means that if we are hungry for God, we can actually increase the number of encounters we have with Him--both the everyday life ones and the direct supernatural ones.

Look at the lives of some of the people who walked close to God. Take David, for example. He was a worshiper and he was always crying out to God. Or take Moses, who when out of his way (off his routine path) to check out the burning bush where God first called him. There was a supernatural hunger in Moses that caused him to change his routine and go where God was doing things. Some of these "detours" were non-trivial, like climbing up a high mountain to meet with God. Or look at Abraham, who obeyed God and left his home to follow God, even though he had no idea where God would take Him.

In short, God loves all of His children, but those who pursue Him seem to get more encounters with Him.

We already talked about three ways to pursue God in earlier lessons: 1) devotions and prayer, 2) worship and 3) waiting on the Lord (or soaking). So what I'd like to do in this lesson to briefly share a few other ways that we can pursue direct encounters with our Lord. These include:

We will cover the first three in this lesson and cover the forth in our next lesson.

Drawing Inspiration From Other's Experiences

Each time I read or hear a testimony of someone else's direct encounter with God, it helps prepare me to have one as well. It does this is a couple of different ways. First, it opens my mind to other ways that God can (and will) meet His children, and it changes my expectations to think that God might do the same thing for me. Closely related to that, it increases My faith that God might meet me in a similar way--after all, if He did it for that person, then He must be willing to meet His children that way. Finally, it increases my hunger. You might say that I get "jealous" for God to meet me too. It is not the "bad" type of jealousy that thinks I should get it instead of the other person. It is the "good"A kind of jealousy that says, "God you did it for this other person and it was great--so now please do it for me too!"

It is sort of like my dogs--I have two dogs and they are both beloved members of my family. If I give one of them a treat, the other one expects to receive that same treat too--add they will get in my face and pursue me until I give it to them.

Let me give you a brief example from my own life. Jim is a prophetic leader who I sometimes look to for mentoring or advice. One time he started having all these daily angelic visits for a period of a few months. It never occurred to me that this was possible until it started happening to him. He would tell me stories of these angel visits, and it would get me hungry to experience them as well.

In fact, I got so hungry for them that I flew over 3000 miles to come stay with Jim and his wife in their home for a week in hopes of having a similar encounter. I did not get that encounter at that time, but a couple of months after I got home, the Lord began sending angels to meet me in my own home. The angels would come bringing me messages from God, and this drew me even closer to Him.

If I hadn't been inspired by Jim's story, I probably wouldn't have started to pursue a similar experience in my own life.

Explicitly Seeking Him

This is so obvious that it almost seems redundant to mention it, but one of the best ways to have a direct encounter with God is to ask Him for one. Matthew 7:7 says, "Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you."

You want a direct encounter with God? Then try asking Him for one. Don't just ask once--but be like a little kid who really wants something from their parents...keep on asking and keep on "pestering" Him for it until you get it. The tense of the "ask" verb in the original Greek was a continuous tense. It would be more accurately translated as "Ask God-- start now and keep on asking until you get it, and you will receive it."

Then there is Psalm 37:4, which says, "Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desire of your heart." In short, when you are hungry for God and for an encounter with Him, then He will give it to you.

Look at the life of King David. He was always crying out to God. He would pray things like "Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths!" (Psalm 25:4> or "Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me" (Psalm 51:11). David described his hunger for God in Psalm 63:1, "O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water."

In short, David cried out to God--he frequently asked God for more encounters with Him. And God's response to that was to meet David and to be come best friends with him.

Likewise, the more we explicitly seek God, the more likely we are to find Him! If we ask God to meet us and give us direct supernatural encounters with Himself, He is more likely to give them to us than if we don't ask.

Radical Obedience

Jesus said in John 14:15, "If you love Me, then obey Me." Thus, obeying Him from a heart of love is one of the ways that we demonstrate our love to God. (This is not the same as a begrudging reluctant obedience or feeling "forced" into obeying Him. Remember, the Lord looks at the motivation/attitude of our heart as much as He looks at our actions.)

But when we obey Him because we love Him, this really pleases God, and it is not uncommon for God to reward our obedience by giving us personal encounters with Himself. I could write a whole lesson (probably more than just one) on this topic, but I am going to keep my discussion brief here.

Jesus said in John 15:14: "You are My friends if you do whatever I command you." In short, if you want to be God's friend, then you need to make Him Lord/boss of your life, and you need to be committed to doing what ever He tells you to do. If you look at all of the men in the bible who God calls friends, you will see that each of them had to radically obey God more than once.

Abraham had to leave his home and follow God. He also was prepared to obey God and sacrifice the thing that was most precious to him (his son Isaac) at God's command. Of course, God was only testing his obedience and not planning to have Abraham kill his son and heir, but Abraham did not know that when he climbed the mountain to build the altar and prepare the sacrifice. And Abraham's heart to obey God (even at great personal expense) earned him a friendship status with God. Look at what God says about him in Isaiah 41:8, "Abraham [is] My friend."

David was another person with a heart to obey God. God removed King Saul and selected David instead, and God explains his reason for rejecting Saul in 1 Samuel 15:11, "I greatly regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned back from following Me, and has not performed My commandments." And this is what God said about David in 1 Samuel 13:14: "The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be commander over His people." In short David had a heart to obey God and God considered him a friend.

Obedience was also a key characteristic in Moses' walk with God. Moses had to go before a pharaoh who terrified him to perform signs, then he had to lead a rebellious Israel, one step at a time, by first getting a direction from God and then obeying it. For example, God brought him to the edge of the Red Sea and then told him to stretch his rod over the water. If Moses did not obey God and stretch out the rod, the Red Sea would not have parted. But Moses obeyed every single thing that God instructed him to do, and as a result, he saw God's power and anointing go forth in amazing ways.

Radical obedience out of a heart of love for God is what brought these people into a friendship with God. Now, there is something really special about being God's friend--it gets you a greater revelation of God. Jesus said so in John 15:15: "No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you."

There is so much more I could say on this subject, but the lesson is already getting long. So suffice it to say that many of my most amazing and most powerful encounters with God have occurred when I was actively obeying Him. I truly believe that having a heart to obey God is one of the keys to having direct encounters with Him.


-- © GodSpeak International 2008 --
-- Do not republish without written permission from <copyright@godspeak.net> --

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